The Chinese writing system has no alphabet because it was developed before the invention of the alphabet. Thus, words are not represented by combinations of letters. Instead, words are represented by single characters, combinations of two characters, combinations of three characters, and so on.
If every word were represented by a single character, then a translation machine could easily be built. The machine would simply look up the foreign translation of each Chinese character and display the translation.
Computers have been built that do nothing more than that, i.e., character translation. Such computers translate individual Chinese characters into English words or words of other languages. However, these computers are unsatisfactory because the Chinese language employs many words that are formed of multiple characters, as mentioned earlier, and the meaning of a multiple-character word is often not apparent if each character of the word is translated without regard to other characters with which it is grouped. Accordingly, a computer that simply looks up the translation of each character in a sentence will often produce a nonsensical or difficult-to-interpret and sometimes erroneous translation.
For example, a computer that mindlessly converts each Chinese character in a sentence into its English equivalent will produce "I no good meaning thought" when the five Chinese characters having those respective meanings are encountered. People who are fluent in Chinese will know the meaning of the expression, of course, but those people are not in need of a translation in the first place. Those who are not fluent in the language will therefore attempt to guess the meaning of the expression, and most people will guess that it means "My thoughts have no good meaning," or "I am having thoughts of no good meaning," or the like. The expression actually means "I feel embarrassed." Prior to the making of the present invention, no translation computer was capable of making such a translation.
As another example, the Mandarin word for "very" is represented by a single character, so it might seem that a computer that simply converts characters into words would have no problem with a single character word such as "very." However, in any Chinese story or article about people, such a computer will include translations such as "first born Chang and very very Chang," for example. Again, those familiar with the language will know that "first born" means "Mr." and "very very" means "Mrs.," but others will attempt to guess the meaning of the translation and are unlikely to guess correctly.
One out of every five people in the world use the Chinese writing system. No translation of the written characters is needed between dialects such as Mandarin and Cantonese, because all Chinese dialects use the same written characters with the same meaning, i.e., only the pronunciation of the characters differs. The volume of technical journals and works of art published each year in Chinese is substantial. Most of these works are inaccessible to those who do not know the language, and most technically trained people in the West have little or no training in any foreign language. Thus, a computer that introduces Chinese literature and technical writings to those who have not learned the language is clearly needed. Computers that simply convert individual Chinese characters into individual words of a different language, i.e., character translation computers, have little utility as established by the examples given above, but the prior art, when considered as a whole in accordance with the requirements of law, neither teaches nor suggests to those of ordinary skill in this art how better translations could be provided.